So May the Sunrise
by Startide Risen
Summary: "We said no kids," Dean says, looking rather lost. "We had good reasons."


_August 8, 2016_

The first present Dean ever gave Maria was a pair of graceful wooden rocking chairs. She came home from work one evening to find them arranged companionably on her front porch, gleaming white and nodding to each other in the light breeze.

Five years of wind, rain, and sun have dulled and chipped the paint, but the chairs are sturdy as ever. Sam always takes the one on the right when he and Dean come out here with a six-pack and some music. He's spent half his life sitting with Dean to his left. No reason to change now.

This morning, he goes out to the porch with his coffee to watch the sun come up. Dean and Maria are at the top of the porch steps, wrapped around each other tightly.

"I get off at six," she mumbles into his shirt. "We can talk more when I get home."

"Okay, I'll see you then." He kisses the top of her head. "I love you, sweetheart."

Sam makes himself scarce. When he comes back with another mug of black coffee, he finds Dean at the railing, watching Maria's 4Runner out of sight.

"Coffee?"

"Thanks."

They take their accustomed seats. The dew evaporates quickly in the rising summer heat, and the tire swing twists lazily from the tree. Under Sam and Dean's supervision, the sun comes up gorgeous.

"Is she okay?" Sam says at length.

Dean doesn't answer.

Two weeks ago, Ben Braeden showed up on their doorstep asking if Dean _wouldn't mind, maybe, um, taking a paternity test?_ For the next four days, Maria was manically polite to everyone, and Sam and Dean both assumed that her sudden attacks of nausea were due to stress and anxiety. When the test results came back, she disappeared to the barn to cry with relief.

Ben left a week ago. The nausea didn't.

Dean takes a deep breath. He addresses his coffee rather than Sam when he finally says, "This wasn't supposed to happen."

"Yeah. That's the part I don't get," Sam confesses. "Maria said you were careful. She had a… a thing, didn't she?" He makes vague, claw-like gestures. In truth he has no idea what the thing looks like, but it sounded scary and claw-like when Maria explained it once.

"An IUD," Dean says. "She had to have it taken out."

Curiosity is a reflex. "Why?"

Dean shoots him a look of incredulous disgust. "For complicated gynecological reasons I'd feel uncomfortable discussing with you. Asshole."

Sam backs off of that one. "What about the pill?"

"She had an appointment so she could get a prescription," Dean says. "Until that job in Atlanta went bad, and it was the last thing on anybody's mind."

"Didn't you think of—?"

"Think of what? We thought we were going to die."

"That doesn't count as contraception." It slips out before Sam can stop it, and he braces for the punch.

But Dean just grits out, "That's helpful. Thank you, Sam." He slumps, head in his hands, and mumbles, "That was a helpful comment."

"So what happens now?"

Muffled with his hands scrubbing his face, Dean says, "I don't know, man."

Sam thinks long and hard before bringing up this next one. He realizes he has no idea what Dean believes on this point, though he has a good idea about Maria. "Would you consider, um, not going through with the pregnancy?"

"She brought it up," Dean says, drawing his hand across his mouth. "It's an option in theory."

"What do you mean, in theory?"

"I mean she spent twelve years at an all-girls school with actual nuns. Theory is one thing. Deep-seated, agonizing guilt is something else."

Sam guessed as much. He knows a little something about deep-seated, agonizing guilt, and at this point he is just not impressed by it. "That is a crap reason to bring a whole new person into the world."

Dean looks cornered and a little panicky around the edges. "It's more than that, all right? She said… she said it's not just Church doctrine about souls or whatever. She said…"

_She can't destroy something that's yours_, Sam thinks with a twinge. _Yours and hers_.

Long ago, on a tattered third-hand sofa in their first apartment, Jess lay with her head in Sam's lap watching _South Park_ or maybe _The Simpsons_ when a character cracked a joke about antibiotics interfering with the pill.

Jess sat bolt upright. "That can happen?"

"I don't know. Can it?" was the best Sam could offer.

After ten minutes of frantic Googling and one trip to the university women's center, Jess stopped panicking and settled back into his arms on the sofa.

"Sometimes I don't like all this womany, uterus stuff," she grumbled.

"You know, we've never talked about what we'd do," Sam said thoughtfully. "If it did happen." He was fairly confident he knew her answer – the girl had a Flying Spaghetti Monster screensaver and had actually read Judith Butler – but she was quiet for a long time.

"A year ago," she said slowly, "I would've known exactly. But that was before I loved you. Now… I'm not saying I'd keep it for sure. But it would be hard, you know? It would be really hard to destroy something that was yours. Yours and mine. Something we made."

Warmth pooled in his belly, and he kissed her breathless. Then he ran another quick errand for preventative measures, because, God, not for another five or ten years, at least.

Jess was a twenty-year-old in the early stages of love with her first serious boyfriend. Sam can extrapolate, just a little bit, how it might feel for a married Catholic woman of thirty-three.

"We said no kids," Dean says, looking rather lost. "We had good reasons."

Sam tries to soften his tone, because it's not Dean's fault he tripped and fell into the life Sam meant to make for himself. "I know, man."

"You know how many things have grudges against us and think babies are delicious?"

"I am keenly aware."

"We live under a fake name. Think how bad that could blow up our lives."

Sam nods along. "Okay, yeah."

"Maria works long hours. You and me are gone a lot."

"Also true."

Dean gestures back and forth between them. "We are felons."

"We were never convicted."

"And you know we're too fucked in the head to be parents," Dean snaps, as if Sam had just advocated making six more babies after this one. "Maria's a mess, you're a disaster, and I've been told I have issues myself."

Sam closes his eyes in a heroic effort not to roll them. "Yes, there is definitely baggage there."

"We had good reasons."

"I know you did." But Sam was paying attention two weeks ago when Ben Braeden was here, and he didn't miss the wistful look on Dean's face when the kid drove away. He hears what his brother is conspicuously not saying. "But, Dean, do you want—?"

"No!" Dean growls.

Sam waits.

Dean stares at his intertwined fingers as though something precious has just slipped through them. "No," he repeats softly.

Sam could hit him right now. _Look at what she's offering you, man. She's lying in your lap saying, _yours and mine, something we made_. What kind of fucking coward turns that down, after all we've been through?_

He doesn't mean to sound so aloof when he says, "You know, most of hell is terrified of us these days."

Dean glances up, confused.

"Heaven's got new management, and they owe us some massive favors. Henriksen's got our backs with the Feds. And you know ever since the shapeshifter, the Nazareth Sheriff's Office is behind us all the way."

"Sam…"

"The point is, if anything tried to hurt that kid, I can think of five different world-class hunters, three cops, a psychic, an FBI agent, and two angels of the Lord who would all team up to track it down and kill it."

Apparently Dean, rugged and manly individualist that he is, has kept no mental directory of how many powerful allies they've accumulated over the past eleven years. His mouth is open a little bit.

"So that leaves the part where you're fucked in the head," Sam concludes.

Finally, Dean chuckles. "Yeah, let's see you spin that into an episode of _Full House_."

Sam just sips his coffee. He lets the big Kansas sky turn blue, and he listens to the runners of the rocking chairs whispering against the timeworn floorboards. In time, Dean gets to his feet and stretches with gratuitous nasty cracking noises. "We're cleaning and oiling the equipment in the barn today, Sasquatch."

"You mean the mower, the generator, or the – "

"All of it. Put your boots on."

Sam sighs and leaves the rocker swaying behind him.

Two days later, Sam is working in the study when he hears a joyous whoop from the master bedroom directly overhead. He barely looks up; he's busy rounding out the Squickipedia entry on _loup garou_ with Dad's notes, his own research, and Dean's messy, fragmented scribbles. It's been slow, painstaking work, and if he hadn't learned to ignore random distractions, he'd never get anything done.

He successfully ignores the subsequent moans and rhythmic creaking as well.

Twenty minutes later, Maria tiptoes in, and he pays her no mind until she comes around behind his desk. "Sam?"

He looks up. "You should really consider – "

But then he gets a good look at her, and his quip about better insulation dies on his tongue. Her face is tear-streaked, and her eyes are red.

But she's happy. In fact, she's so incandescently happy, they could probably throw out that damn generator and power the house off her smile.

He knows immediately. "You're gonna do it."

She throws her arms around his neck. "Do you want a niece or a nephew?"

"I get to pick?"

She half-laughs, half-sniffles right next to his ear. "Dean says he'll be happy either way."

Sam wants a nephew, a carbon copy of Dean who'll never have to kill or bleed for someone else's crusade. A do-over for the universe – and get it _right_ this time, damn it. He wants a niece just like Maria, because if one Maria is good for Dean then another one in miniature will be twice as good, right?

He wants Dean and Maria to change their minds, because the Winchesters are felons living under an assumed name with a list of enemies longer and meaner than the State Department's, and what kind of moron brings a child into that? He wants them to change their minds, because if they don't then everything will change.

But he also wants them to have six more after this one.

"Say something," she says with another sniffle. "What do you think?"

He hugs her hard. "I think I'm going to buy you a new rocking chair."


End file.
